


Say Something Loving

by SuiteJayne



Series: Night and Day [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Light Angst, M/M, Masturbation, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, Parentlock, Porn with Feelings, Post-Season/Series 04, a bit fluffy, emotional catharsis, loads of unabashed sentiment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:34:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27193174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuiteJayne/pseuds/SuiteJayne
Summary: More than a year has passed since the traumatic events of s4, and John and Sherlock have settled into a rhythm as friends and colleagues and even co-parents. But separately, both wish they could reignite their relationship. Meanwhile, John has to get something off his chest.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: Night and Day [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1985095
Comments: 4
Kudos: 74





	Say Something Loving

**Author's Note:**

> So, I stole the title from [the lovely song by the xx](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl9tcrIeJ48), which incidentally I think would make a nice soundtrack to this story. : )

The first time John said it was a little over a year after he’d moved back into 221b along with Rosie. It was late morning, and John was lying on the couch, dozing. Mrs. Hudson had slept in their flat with Rosie while Sherlock and John spent the night under drizzling skies, poking around a crime scene in a disused allotment. This morning Sherlock was in the kitchen, preparing a series of slides. Nothing more sinister than some vegetation samples from the night before; he’d readily agreed to move any experiments involving human remains or toxic or flammable materials to Barts now that a toddler shared their home. 

Sherlock placed the first slide under the stage clips and peered through his microscope’s eyepiece, adjusting the focus until the tangle of translucent grey-green cells began to come into focus under the lens. In his peripheral vision, Rosie wandered up to her father and nudged his shoulder with her sippy cup. John opened one bleary eye.

“What is it, darling? You want more water? I’m resting. Go ask your other dad.”

Sherlock jerked the focus knob and the objective lens hit the slide and cracked it in two. He managed not to react otherwise, although his heart leaped into his throat.

The second time it happened was a week later, at the corner shop. They’d collected Rosie from the creche on the way home from the Yard. John grabbed some milk while Sherlock stared at the rows of forbidden cigarettes behind the counter. He heard John’s voice behind him.

“Rosie, no. Put it back.”

He turned to see that Rosie had presented her father with a chocolate bar.

“Chockit,” she observed, not making a move to replace it on the shelf.

“You’ll ruin your appetite. We’re eating dinner when we get home.”

“Chockit,” Rosie repeated firmly. John sighed. 

“Go ask your other dad.”

Sherlock’s mind reeled. Christ, now he really needed a cigarette. Rosie came crowding around his legs; he gathered her up in one arm and paid for the milk and the chocolate without a word. 

That night, Sherlock lay on the couch while John and Rosie slept upstairs in the room they shared. He fancied he was lying in the indentation left by John’s latest nap. Perhaps this would help him divine what was going through John’s head. 

_Your other dad._

If Sherlock was Rosie’s other dad, what was he to _John_? 

After the surreal events of the previous year, it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world for John and Rosie to move in with Sherlock--to come home, he thought, but didn’t say. Given their history, Sherlock supposed it could have been awkward, readjusting to living together under new terms, new circumstances. But for him it had just been a tremendous relief. 

After his return from Serbia, Sherlock had adjusted to a kind of low-grade grief that pressed down on him constantly and at acute moments seemed to squeeze the breath out of him. John had been living with Mary, the two of them wrapped up in one another and then in their new baby. And rightly so, of course. Sherlock had understood intellectually that it was right, even if he couldn’t bring himself to feel it. 

He’d missed John almost more at that time than when he’d been abroad. During those two grim years, he’d at least had a purpose that was bound up in his love for John, in keeping John safe. It was perfect, in a way. A total immersion in puzzle-solving and periodic violence--two of his personal specialties--all in the service of the person he cared most about. He’d had neither the time nor the ability to keep tabs on John as he’d have liked to do, trusting that Mycroft would watch over him, and somehow the possibility had escaped him that John would shake off the dust of their shared life so completely. 

Their new platonic friendship had advanced in fits and starts; working around John’s job and his new relationship. Meanwhile, Mary had proved to be a more than formidable accomplice for Sherlock, whose admiration and affection for her had flourished in the short time he’d known her. When she died--because of him, protecting him--he’d been smothered by guilt, an utterly alien emotion. He’d never experienced anything like it. He’d welcomed Mary’s directive to go to hell to save John, had embraced everything that might mean, had accepted anger, spite, violence from his former lover as his due. He’d been prepared to die and was a little surprised, in the end, that he didn’t actually want to, that maybe there was still something left for him to hope for.

And then John was restored to him. Not entirely, of course, but God, wasn’t this enough? Now Sherlock could just hear John snoring above the white noise machine in his room, the door of which must be ajar. Love and want surged through his body. How was it possible? His body, his heart were acting as though nothing had changed, when in fact everything, little and big, had changed. He was half hard. He unbuttoned his trousers and reached in to stroke himself, letting himself imagine--just this one time--that John was touching him, kissing him, loving him again.

\--

The following morning, John woke up to the sound of Sherlock playing the violin. That was nothing unusual, but it occurred to him that the room was oddly bright. He glanced at his alarm clock; it was 7:30. That explained it. Generally Rosie woke at 6, if not before, and woke John up chattering away to herself in her cot. The windows blazed with light; he’d forgotten to draw the curtains last night. He sat up and looked over at Rosie’s cot. It was empty. Oh God, she had learned to climb out of it!

John sprang out of bed, cursing softly. He’d find her downstairs, and she’d be fine, of course she would...but a nagging parental voice of panic in John’s head kept supplying images of Rosie drowning in a bathtub left undrained or cutting herself with a paring knife set down carelessly close to the edge of the kitchen counter. Sherlock was more attentive to Rosie than John would have expected, but he was still quite capable of getting lost in his own ruminations for hours. Rosie could be running amok throughout the flat while Sherlock stared into space.

John ran down the stairs, about to sprint to the bathroom to reassure himself that his child had not drowned, but he stopped in the doorway to the sitting room. Sherlock was waltzing around the room, barefoot in his tee shirt and pajama bottoms, playing all the while. The tune was nothing John recognized; perhaps it was something that Sherlock had composed. Rosie was with him, doing her toddler version of a waltz, sawing away at a badminton racket with a wooden spoon for a bow. Sherlock looked relaxed and happy, swaying on the carpet, grinning playfully at Rosie, humming softly along with his own playing. Just then he made a graceful turn and caught sight of John standing there.

“Ah, here’s the man we’ve been waiting for,” Sherlock said, lowering his instrument and smiling at John. It was such an uncomplicated smile that somehow, time seemed to fold into itself like a telescope, and John had the dizzying sense that he was back at the beginning, back when he and Sherlock were first discovering each other. It was as if everything that had happened to them after Sherlock’s fall came undone, like a hopelessly knotted rope loosened and smoothed. John was seized with joy that made his heart pound. Then his little daughter came crashing into his knees, wrapping her arms around his legs, and he swept her up into his embrace.

“There you are, my darling,” he murmured, looking back at Sherlock, who had turned to put his violin away in its case on the table by the windows. “I missed you when I woke up.”

Sherlock glanced sidelong at John for a fraction of a second; his face seemed to flush slightly. With a few quick strides, John thought, he could be across the room, could throw his arms around Sherlock, could kiss him. He cleared his throat and shifted Rosie from one arm to the other. Sherlock snapped the violin case closed and turned to John, his hands on his hips and the slightly guarded expression that he now often wore restored.

“She’s learned to escape her cot, it would seem,” Sherlock said lightly. “But she can still be contained with a baby gate at the top of the stairs, for now.”

“Yes, I’ll--I’ll see to it,” John said, recovering himself. “I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?”

“Please.”

With that, Sherlock retreated into his bedroom to get dressed. John set Rosie down, and she raced across the floor to the nearest cache of toys. The joy that had come over John ebbed, leaving a hollow place, like a sea cave when the tide is sucked out of it. 

_Be grateful for what you have_ , he silently admonished himself. _It’s more than you deserve_.

\--

Early one morning later that week, Sherlock was muttering at the screen of his--scratch that, John’s--laptop as John herded Rosie towards the door.

“I need a second look at the crime scene today. There’s something I’m missing,” Sherlock said, glancing up at John, who was attempting to maneuver Rosie’s arms into the sleeves of her raincoat. 

“Hmm, well, seeing it in daylight will make a difference, I’m sure. I’m off work mid-afternoon, but I don’t need to collect Rosie till six, so I’ll join you there, shall I?”

“Yes. Text me when you’re on your way.”

“Will do.” 

John bundled Rosie out the door with an odd twist in his stomach. He paused with the doorknob in his hand, looking back into the room at his friend hunched over the computer. Sunlight streamed in through the windows, glinting on his familiar profile and illuminating stray hairs standing up from his mop of curls. The sunlight seemed to collect in Sherlock’s irises; they almost glowed, lit up grey-blue like miniature tidal pools. It was an effect that John had always found fascinating, and he couldn’t help but let himself linger in this secret moment. Then Sherlock glanced over and met his eyes, a subtle line of puzzlement appearing between his eyebrows.

“John?”

John shook himself.

“Nothing, just...be careful. That’s all.”

Sherlock nodded and turned back to the screen.

All day John’s heart was in his mouth; he couldn’t have said why. There was nothing unusual about this day, about the case in question, no reason for the tension that sang along his nerves. He managed to do the bare minimum to concentrate on his patients, grateful that they presented his distracted brain with nothing too complex. Finally, he concluded his last appointment and forced himself to enter detailed notes into the records system before leaving. He took a cab instead of the bus in a concession to his anxiety and arrived back at the derelict allotment twenty minutes later. 

John looked around as he fished out the money for the cab driver. The weather was overcast but dry, and he could see Sherlock on the far end of the overgrown plot, crouching by a chain-link fence and peering through his magnifier. A car came down the street on the opposite side of the fence and disappeared around the corner. John started to make his way over the uneven ground and around piles of rubbish--an old tyre, broken flower pots, the rusting, twisted frame of a bicycle. Just then the car that had just passed reappeared, its passenger side window opened, and John heard several popping sounds. He instinctively threw himself to the ground but when he looked up, he saw that far from taking cover, Sherlock had leaped up and was running toward the nearest gap in the fence and after the car which now sped away down the street.

“No, you idiot, we run _away_ from gunfire,” John muttered, scrambling to his feet and running after Sherlock. He caught up with him two streets down, Sherlock standing in the middle of the road, out of breath and grinning after the distantly retreating car.

“John, there you are!” Sherlock crowed. He pulled out his phone and started texting, talking all the while. “What a lucky break! As you know, John, I have a love/hate relationship with the London criminal classes. I _love_ that they’re so bloody stupid as to provide me with more information just as I’m hitting a wall, and I _hate_ that they’re so bloody stupid that we’ll have this wrapped up by nightfall.” 

John wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him, wanted to slide his hands between the open sides of his coat and wrap his arms around him. He wanted to drag him away from guns and chases and cops and robbers. He wanted to get him home and lock the door behind them.

“They _shot_ at you!” he heard himself wail.

“I know! I love it when they do that.”

“You could have died!”

“Unlikely; he was a rubbish shot. Didn’t you see? Let’s ask if Lestrade will let us ride along on the raid. I’ve narrowed the likely locations for their hideout down to three and--”

“No!”

Sherlock’s fingers stilled on his phone’s touch screen and he glanced at John quizzically. John tried to calm himself, to keep the desperation out of his voice.

“Look, can’t we just… Can’t we just go home?”

“To get your gun?” Sherlock replied slowly. “Yes, good idea. I’ll tell Lestrade to meet us there and I’ll put Mrs. Hudson on standby to collect Rosie from the creche if this goes long.”

He pocketed his phone and turned to stride off toward the high street. Without thinking, John grabbed his hand. Sherlock sucked in a sharp breath and turned back immediately to face him. He looked down to where John’s hand held his own and then looked searchingly into John’s face. The physical contact seemed shocking to Sherlock. Had it really been so long since one of them had touched the other?

“I mean, can’t we just go home and--and stay home?” John said softly. “Let Lestrade and Donovan catch the bad guys on their own for once?”

Sherlock regarded him silently for a few moments more. His brow knit, he lowered his gaze to their joined hands once more. The sky was clearing; John became suddenly aware of pale, tentative sunlight filtering down through the departing wisps of cloud, filling the puddles at their feet with sudden reflections and limning the contours of Sherlock’s face before him.

“Yes,” Sherlock finally said. “We can go home.” He gave John’s hand a minute squeeze; the tiny gesture filled John with an agonizing hopefulness that he did his best to repress. 

“There’s a bus that runs two streets east of here and goes directly to Regents Park--” John began in an attempt to shake off the heightened atmosphere. It had the desired effect. Sherlock scoffed and gave a dismissive little toss of his head.

“Oh, please,” he said, withdrawing his hand and turning up his coat collar as he started toward the high street and the nearest taxis. John smiled and followed him.

They sat without speaking in the back of the taxi as they had so many times before, Sherlock taking out his phone to send a rapid series of texts to Lestrade before sliding it into his pocket again and drumming his fingers on the seat.

Well, John thought, he’d somehow got what he’d wanted and they were on their way home. Why in God’s name had he insisted on this? This case was nothing they hadn’t tackled a hundred times, but somehow the thought of getting into yet another death-defying scrape _now_ , before he’d had a chance to...no. He couldn’t bear it. He’d gladly follow Sherlock after a gang of hardened criminals, dodge bullets, run down dark alleys, jump across rooftops _tomorrow_ , if he could just screw up the courage to tell him, _today_.

_Tell him what?_

John glanced over at Sherlock, who was looking away from him out the window, his right arm slung over the back of the seat and his right index and middle finger tracing the line of his lips. His left hand lay on the seat between the two of them. John reached for it again on impulse, grasped Sherlock’s long fingers and felt an answering squeeze.

\--

“All right,” said Sherlock, hanging up his coat and turning to John, who was closing the door of 221b behind them and locking it. _Against what or whom?_ Sherlock thought exasperatedly. The most wonderfully dangerous man in London was on _this_ side of the door. “I admit that I can’t put it together; just tell me. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Why would anything be wrong?” John said unconvincingly, avoiding Sherlock’s gaze as he moved across the room to sling his jacket over his chair. Sherlock narrowed his eyes and followed him over.

“We’re missing a very promising raid with possible gunplay. You love that sort of thing; we both do.” 

He took another step forward, hesitated a moment, then put a hand on John’s shoulder and gently turned John to face him. 

“So why exactly are we _here_?” 

John raised his eyes to meet Sherlock’s and took a breath as if to answer him. But instead, he stepped very close to Sherlock, went up on his toes, and kissed him. 

Sherlock’s hand, which still lay on John’s shoulder, clutched John’s shirt as his other hand flew up to touch the side of his face. John grabbed Sherlock’s shirt and pulled it out of his trousers so his hands could move up the bare skin of his back and pull him closer. Sherlock’s hands slid into John’s hair, which was sleeker and longer and greyer than it had been the last time he’d touched it.

John made a plaintive noise and closed his eyes; the kiss grew hungrier and Sherlock sucked John’s lower lip; his mouth was watering and he swallowed a sudden rush of saliva. They stumbled backward to the sofa, Sherlock ending up under John, like the last time, but not at all like the last time time, because John was kissing him gently, caressing his face, smoothing his curls, unbuttoning his shirt, all the while rutting against him as if he couldn’t help himself.

Sherlock reached down to undo John’s belt and trousers; John helpfully raised his hips to allow it and fumbled at Sherlock’s trousers in turn. Soon Sherlock was nude from the waist down and John’s trousers and pants were around his knees. Sherlock reached around to grab John’s arse and pull him tightly to him but slipped so he was half-on, half-off the sofa. John moaned as their erections were squeezed between them.

“Oh Christ--” Sherlock grabbed at him so forcefully that the two slid the rest of the way off the sofa and thumped to the floor. John laughed breathlessly.

“Bedroom?”

“Bedroom.” 

Sherlock clambered to his feet and helped John up and out of the rest of his clothes. John’s hands were on his hips and he bent to kiss him again, shedding his shirt as they stumbled back towards his bedroom and onto the bed. He got on top of John and lay between his legs, fumbling in the bedside table for lube. He spread a palmful on their twinned erections and grasped them both as best he could, pumping lightly. John threw his arms back over his head, moaning and sighing at the sensations. The sight was too erotic. Sherlock let go of John’s cock, grasped his own and rubbed the head along John’s perineum, forward and back so that it pushed against his balls at the front and just brushed his arsehole at the back end of each stroke.

“Oh, God, I want you,” John groaned. “Please, please--”

“Can I?”

“Christ, yes!”

“Condom? Though I’ve been tested since--”

“I know, I looked at your medical records.”

“You did? I’ve rubbed off on you.”

They both smiled at the double entendre. John folded up his legs and wrapped them around Sherlock’s back. Sherlock lowered himself on top of him, insinuating his arms underneath him to hug him close. They lay like that, chests pressed together, sticky with sweat, kissing. Sherlock kept his eyes open; he couldn’t seem to let them close, needing to drink in the visual data, each beloved detail of John’s face and body at close range. He licked at John’s neck where it met his jaw with its grit of stubble, admired his incongruously boyish nose and the wry line of his smile, traced his fingers over John’s chest and arms, their spray of hair lighter in color but denser than his own. He slipped his hand between John’s buttocks and rubbed little circles around his anus with the pad of his index finger.

“You want me to--?”

John shook his head a little.

“I’m fine, just go slow.”

Sherlock slicked himself with another generous palmful of lube as John put a pillow under his hips to get the angle right. Sherlock rubbed the head of his cock against John’s arsehole and felt him relax, then pressed forward gently into him. John shuddered and he halted.

“No, it’s good, keep going.”

He moved again and John’s body seemed to draw him in. He sank deeper, then pulled back and thrust shallowly till John was panting.

“More, come on!”

He went a little deeper, a little deeper, moving inside him and listening to John’s shaky breaths and murmured encouragement. Like this, though, he couldn’t kiss John; their height difference was too great. He pulled back and commenced thrusting shallowly again, bending to brush his lips against John’s. The feeling of their lips connecting while he was inside John was so powerful that Sherlock was suddenly closer to orgasm than he’d realized.

“Oh, I’m going to--” 

Then he was coming and coming inside him, and slipping out, and John was grabbing Sherlock’s wrist and guiding his hand, fucking Sherlock’s fist and coming gloriously all over it, and they were both laughing breathlessly with delight and relief.

\--

A little while later John came back to bed with two glasses of water. His expression was muted. Sherlock’s heart clenched. _Oh no. Oh God. Regrets, already?_

John lay back down next to him. 

“I need to say something,” he said, looking at the ceiling. Sherlock tried to knit together the shattered fragments of his composure. They could still go back to friendship, to the way things were yesterday. This need not ruin that fragile thing they had. Finally, John spoke again.

“Everything I said and did after Mary died. I’m sorry. I never said it properly.”

Sherlock let out the breath he’d been holding in a rush.

“You don’t need to say it.”

“Yes, I do. I do, but you don’t need to accept my apology. I did unforgivable things.”

“I’ve already forgiven you.”

John scoffed. He turned on his side, head propped on his right hand, to look at Sherlock.

“No, you don’t understand--this--this isn’t normal. You and me, here, like this, after everything that happened, everything that I did.”

Sherlock sighed and turned on his side as well, mirroring John’s posture.

“But John, it’s never been normal. You shot someone to save my life on our first date.”

John let out a little huff of laughter.

“It wasn’t a date. But point taken. It was an unusual start.”

“Start as you mean to go on, I always say.”

“Do you?”

“I shall start saying it.”

They both smiled.

“We did go on exactly as we started, didn’t we,” said John, more seriously again. “You pretended to kill yourself to protect me. Then my wife nearly killed you for real.”

“But then she saved my life.”

“And you killed a man to save hers.”

“And she died saving mine. Saving it _again_ ,” Sherlock said with a grimace. “It was my fault.”

“It wasn’t. I know I said it at the time but--” John looked down. “It was one of the many wrong things I said. And did.”

“You were grieving. You weren’t sleeping.”

“Don’t make excuses for me. The things I said… And at the hospital...I assaulted you. I hurt you.”

“Oh, physically, perhaps. It’s just transport.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“I’m a sociopath. I didn’t take it all that personally,” Sherlock said, flopping onto his back again. “I don’t feel things the way that other people do.”

“We both know that’s not true,” John replied heatedly, propping himself up on both elbows now. “You should be angry with me. You should hate me!”

Sherlock scrubbed his face with his hands, then balled them at his sides.

“John, I’m no good at this, at these-- _conversations_ ,” he said with a kind of contempt for the word. “And neither are you. You seem to want to hear that I’m angry, that I hate you, that I’ll never forgive you. And maybe you’re right. Maybe I should be angry. Maybe it’s wrong to forgive you. But all I can tell you is that after Mary died, after--” 

Sherlock waved a hand in the space between the two of them, shorthand for every shitty thing that had come to pass. He looked at John before turning away and squeezing his eyes shut, forcing the rest out through gritted teeth. 

“I’d been reckless, and she’d died because of me. You’d lost her because of me. I hated myself. I didn’t have any hate left over for you. And do you know what I think? I think that’s what you feel now. You hurt me, and you despise yourself, and you think I’m the only one who can punish you. But I can’t do that. And I can’t absolve you. And I can’t _make_ you be at peace. I can only--” 

_Love you._

Sherlock broke off, completing the thought silently. Then he felt John’s head fall to his shoulder and opened his eyes, turning to him. John was crying, pressing his face into Sherlock’s shoulder, his tears starting to run along Sherlock’s collarbone to the base of his throat.

“I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve you,” John said, his voice muffled, cracking.

“Maybe not, but...” He was quiet for a moment. “You’ve got me. If you want me.”

In answer, John surged up the bed to kiss Sherlock again, holding his face in his hands and moaning softly into his mouth. The kiss was salty with tears.

“More than anything,” John said before pressing his lips to Sherlock’s again. Sherlock kissed him back and put his arms around him. It felt so familiar and so unfamiliar at once that it gave him vertigo. It was like waking up from a yearslong, dark dream. He pulled back a little to look into John’s eyes, filled with life and intelligence and...yes, it _was_ there. That feeling. He was sure of it. He recognized it from before.

“God, I--I--” Sherlock’s voice broke.

“I love you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> I’m sure this goes without saying, but I for some reason feel the need to say it anyway: as much as I enjoyed imagining these two fictional characters getting back together, this is not intended to represent a healthy model for any real-life relationship!
> 
> One more musical note (ha ha): the phrase “your other dad” was borrowed from Rufus Wainwright’s beautiful song “[Montauk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrvj4ph2vKw&ab_channel=RufusWainwright-Topic).”


End file.
